Books for sale at our nearby Costco:
(I showed She Persisted to a friend and he asked “Is that a book about divorce plaintiffs?”)
Books on display at our local library:
Who said Print is Dead?
Books that are selling at Costco
4 thoughts on “Books that are selling at Costco”
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Ayan Hirsi Ali and Asra Nomani are strangely absent.
I wouldn’t worry about the local library. Here in NYC I stopped into my local library for the first time in a decade because someone told me that you could access books electronically on Kindle for free but my library card did not have whatever chip was necessary to do that. The library is in a brand new building, on the ground floor of a residential high rise, that was probably donated by a developer for air rights. Besides the librarian the only people inside were vagrants who were either taking a snooze or playing video games on the computers. The place smelled of urine and cigarettes. There was a table with recommended books like the ones you highlight but it didn’t seem to me that anyone had taken a book out of that library since it was built. As for the downloading and the Kindle, the interface was so bad that I gave up — it is a better use of time just to buy stuff on Amazon and discard the books that aren’t all that good. Can’t imagine i will ever return to my local library — so i will never know what the librarian thinks is worth reading.
Jack,
Check out Book-Off or the Strand, or just about any thrift store — there are plenty of places left in NYC for a bibliophile to get his fix, and cheaply at that. The supply of old books is outstripping demand.
The libraries in Queens are not so bad as the one you went to, but they are becoming less about books and more about community services and Internet access for the truly clueless. They are still a nice place for nannies to take their charges, and for older kids to do homework and play video games on the computers. My guess is that about 1 in 10 sessions on the kids’ computers is devoted to academic activity. The rest of the time the kids play Flash games (online PC gaming might be the only thing keeping Flash alive.)
The big library in Flushing is very civilized and worth exploring.
Wandering the stacks of a good library is like browsing the Internet, but much more satisfying — the ideas involved span volumes, while online browsing tends to get repetitive after 140 words.
Phil, aren’t there any good used book stores in your area? You go to Costco for a a pallet of mayonaisse, not books.
I used to love Stockholm’s main public library.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5568/15250679595_09a0edc7c2_b.jpg
But after a while, I tired of it because of Economics students from the adjacent School of Economics ruthlessly marked up the books, the little swine.
Before that, the Uppsala university library, Carolina Rediviva. One of the libraries by law having one copy of every book published in Sweden. (Most of them stashed in various offsite locations though.)
https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5568/15250679595_09a0edc7c2_b.jpg
Perhaps the age of reading is over, especially if public libraries are abandoning the role in favor of internet access, lending DVDs, acting as child storage, etc. Nowadays, I think most actual libraries should require paid subscriptions and enforce a lower age limit.